Drew Payne

I used to carry books around with me, back and forth to work, until I got an e-reader. I read to cope with my daily commute, the London Underground doesn't have a great view out of the windows (!!). I love reading. I read Hickory Dickory Dock a long time ago but it was one of the best Poirot novels. It actually has quite a grubby, down beat setting, but Christie presents some interesting characters and a twisting plot. I have set myself the project of writing reviews of all the books I have read. I might not succussed but I'll enjoy trying. And I too like audio books too, I have them on when I'm working. (There's a good BBC radio adaption of The Unexpected Guest)

Thanks for your feedback. It means a lot. I am sorry about your mother. This story was based on things I've observed but it is typical of the things I write. I am fascinated by how characters react to difficult or strange circumstances. I also want to explore people's emotional responses. I want to try and get under the skin of my characters.

I based Liam's trial on a famous/infamous trial of two British 12 year old boys for murder. They were so pitifully under prepared for their trial. I'm afraid but British barristers don't coach their clients into how to give evidence and what to expect in court. I wanted Liam to not to know what to do when the judge entered to show how lost and out of place he was in court. Also, him having to sit on a cushion to be able to be seen over the edge of the dock was taken from real life.

Thanks for the feedback. This is one of the things I wanted to explore with this story, how under British law a 12 year old child can be treated as an adult when charged with a crime. I've worked with adolescents and they are NOT adults, they certainly don't adult reasoning abilities. Mark is Liam's solicitor, in court he'll have a barrister representing him, that is a different lawyer. The British legal system is complicated too. But Liam's barrister was one of my favourite characters to create here.

Thank you. This was actually an easy chapter to write. I've got a chapter, not the next one but one coming up, that isn't going to be easy to write but it has to be written because it is so important to the plot.

Thank you. I'm sorry for the long wait but I've been ill for the last year, and it took away so much of my writing mojo. I'm finally getting back on my feet and I really need to finish this story, if nothing else but to get these characters out of my head. I need to give Liam an ending, and there's still a couple of characters to introduce into this story. I am already working on the next chapters.

Thank you. Liam has had pretty sh*t Christmases, so here is one run by people who want to make it special and give him good memories. It also gave me the chance to explore the character of Janet. She's a person with a lot of responsibilities but what makes her tick. She's no Florence Nightingale but why is she in nursing. I wanted to explore that, and I like her character. It was also interesting to explore Christmas from the point of view of someone for whom wasn't that special, who finally understands why it is.

Thank you. I wanted to capture the joy of Christmas but I also wanted to compare it to the Christmases he had previously known, which were basically really crap by a very bad parent. I always wanted to write about people's generosity at Christmas.

His first Christmas on the ward seemed such a big deal: people were making so much of it, and that surprised him. Paper decorations started to appear over the ward, mainly along the ward’s main corridor. They were mostly flat, paper cut outs of Christmas trees, Father Christmases, Christmas presents, robins and such, all of them liberally highlighted with glitter. Added to these were paper chains and long strands of crepe paper generally twisted into a spiral, hung above doorways and windows, an

I've never managed to see this play on stage but I first heard it as a radio play, when I was a teenager. I was stunned and suprised by the twisting nature of the plot, and what twists. Only after it had finished did I realise it was by Christie. I had never thought of her as a playwright until then. I've since seen several of her plays and never been disappointed. Glad you enjoyed my review. I am enjoying writing them.

This play opens with a startling image. In a sitting room, at night, a man lies dead in his wheelchair while standing over him is his wife holding the gun that killed him. Onto this scene stumbles a man, a stranger to this household. But instead of calling for the police, or even calling for help, the man, the unexpected guest of the play's title, starts to coach the woman in how to get away with the murder of her husband. Agatha Christie had an equally successful career as a playwright as well as a novelist. She is Britain’s most successful woman playwright, her play The Mousetrap is the world's longest running play. But we often forget about this. The Unexpected Guest is a fine example of her murder mystery plays. This one opens with a corpse stage left, but she doesn't treat her plot like a typical detective story. Here the plot comes out of the characters' actions, their reactions to the murder. There is a police inspector and his sidekick sergeant, but these two are much more plot devices so we, the audience, can be told the physical facts of this murder and have the backstory of the dead man explained to us, and this corpse was asking for someone to shoot him. But the real crime solving comes from the interactions of the characters themselves. There are some of her stock characters here. The elderly woman who knows her son too well, the servant who wants to supplement their low wages with a bit of blackmail, and an abused wife who is far from a victim. She does handle these characters well, making the plot flow from them. She makes an interesting comment with the reactions of two of her characters. When a woman thinks a man committed murder for her, she becomes protective over him, standing by him and trying to defend him. When a man thinks a woman has killed for him, he wants to distance himself from her as quickly as possible, leaving her to her fate on her own. However, her treatment of the disabled characters is very of its time and creeks uncomfortably. The victim is a wheelchair-bound man who is so bitter and angry that he could drive anyone to kill him. There's a young man with learning difficulties who is overly excitable and easily manipulated. What is so enjoyable here is the twisting plot. At first we are given a thriller where the question is will this woman get away with murder; then the first twist turns it into a mystery were we don't know who the killer is. After that the plot delivers several twists ending with the last twist where one character is left alone on the stage as the final curtain falls. A play script, even the best play script ever written, is only the third of a great play, the other two-thirds being the acting, direction and staging. As good a read as this play script is, I would still much prefer to see a well-acted and staged production of this play. But plays are written to be acted and not just read. Find it here on Amazon

It is wartime England and in a south coast village an old man watches a boy, with a brightly coloured parrot, walk along a train line. The boy is silent, a Jewish refugee from the horrors in Europe, while the parrot cannot keep quiet, happily speaking long sentences in German. The old man, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, is a famous “Consulting Detective” who has retired to the countryside to keep bees. This encounter with Linus Steinmen, the mute boy, draws the old man into his life and occupants of the home, the local vicarage, were the boy lives. And then another member of the vicarage’s household is murdered. Here Chabon has tried to write a “new” Sherlock Holmes story but as an old man no longer interested in crime. The Second World War setting is interesting but not enough on its own to carry this book, neither is the character and situation of the old man. The character just feels old, there isn’t any regret, loss or even introspection of an old man looking back on his life. The plot did not have enough mystery to hold my attention; the mystery here did not feel important enough to push the plot forward and there wasn’t enough plot, without it, to hold my attention. Unfortunately, the other characters are not strong enough either. So many of the occupants of the vicarage were interchangeable because they were so poorly drawn. The only character who stood out was the vicar’s wife, but that was mainly because she was the only female character there. The book felt like a clever writing exercise, to reimagine Sherlock Holmes in the twilight of his life, but its execution was far too clever, without the feeling for the characters. There was too much extraneous information, as if Chabon was showing off the research he did for this book, but there was so little feeling that these characters were actually living during a war. These people just did not come alive for me. I did not find here the characterisation I have enjoyed in other of Chabon’s books. Sometimes writing exercises should just stay that, sometimes they do not make good books. Find it here on Amazon

Stonemouth is a Scottish seaside town and after five years away Stewart Gilmour returns to it for the funeral of patriarch Joe Murston. Stewart has history with the Murston family, the crime lords of this town, especially with his treatment of Ellie Murston. Added to this is the strange suicide of Callum Murston. Iain Banks’s prose almost effortlessly evokes the Scottish town that has passed its sell-by date and the people who remained there for their many different reasons. He also presents a narrator, Stewart Gilmour, returning to the town, who is swept along by the events surrounding him. Banks also presents a cast of almost larger-than-life characters, especially the members of the criminal Murston family. Unfortunately, we have been here before with Banks’s fiction. Funerals forcing wayward sons home is a plot device he has used before, also those criminal families who are large fishes in very small ponds and beautiful lost loves. He has often portrayed smalltown Scottish life as the backdrop to other works of his. This book has iPhones, CCTV, video games, and a refreshingly frank and joyful bisexual male character (a character in Scottish fiction finally stepping outside the traditional straight and narrow), but so much else of this novel feels like old Banks territory. Banks’s enjoyable and fresh prose certainly lifts this novel and makes it so very readable, with some horribly memorable set-pieces, but I wish he had chosen a different subject. This novel had the feeling of “we have been here before” and those earlier books felt better. Find it here on Amazon

The plot of this novel is riddled with cliches. A novelist, Caz, who is staying in a country cottage to write her next book. She meets a young fan, nine-year-old Theo. Through Theo she meets his mother Ann and finds out that Theo's father Alan was murdered three years ago in strange circumstances and the killer was never caught. Then Theo confesses to Caz that he killed his father. Caz and her boyfriend Will set about finding out who really killed Alan. They do and everyone lives happily ever after, except the murderer of course. After finishing this novel all I felt was that I was waist deep in clichés. Atkins doesn't seem to have any understanding of the nature of human emotions. Her characters only acted within the narrow limits of her very thin plot. I found no insights, no character development or emotional depth in this novel. All I found was a very predictable plot and propaganda for family values. The novel ends with both female characters walking off into marriage and the murderer turns out to be an archetypical threat to family values: he is "mentally retarded" (Sic), a petty thief, envious of a family man, probably a paedophile and is dying from Aids. At best Atkins' characterisation is one-dimensional. A writer who thinks of herself as a free spirit yet happily walks off into marriage. A child genius who talks and acts a like a small adult, not a real child. Without any explanation, halfway through the novel one character is revealed as a wife-beater. The characters just move within Atkins’ plot without any real human emotions. The minor characters were so badly written as to be patronising. A feminist who is dismissed by a man's "winning smile". A caretaker who meekly actually tipped his hat to a "lady". An Anglican priest who’s unmarried, opposed to women’s ordination and can’t even boil water. If there hadn't been a mention of Caz's laptop, I would have believed this novel was set in some idyllic, middle-class 1950s fantasy. A village straight off a chocolate box, the village shop is still open, friendly yokels everywhere and no problems with commuters moving in. Who allowed such a badly over-written novel into print? It is littered with flowery and overblown passages that serve no purpose. The dialogue is stilted and flat, the description clichéd and the characters only there to serve the plot, a very unoriginal one at that. I haven't read such a bad novel in a very long time, but I don't intend doing so again so whatever Atkins' next novel is I won't be reading it. My advice, avoid this novel at all cost. There are so many better writers out there to spend time with. POSTSCRIPT: I originally wrote this review back in 1997 and it was the first review of mine that was ever published

Adam, an aspiring actor, makes the trip from New York to LA in search of fame and fortune. What he finds is a trip into the underside of fame in LA. Here is a modern-day Rake’s Progress; Adam (the narrator) arrives in LA with such high hopes, he has the looks and talent to be a star, but he finds an unfriendly city where he can’t get his foot on the bottom rung of the showbusiness ladder. This novel could have been a pro-faced, and even homophobic, grime tale, warning about the “evils” of Hollywood. Instead, Zeffer’s insightful but equally humorous prose lifts this novel into a far more enjoyable read. Adam’s self-deprecating humour is refreshing and helps make this such a readable book; even as his career spirals down, he still has his eyes set on being a star, imagining himself (when he finally becomes that star) confessing to his sordid past on yet another chat show. Adam’s spiral downwards, until he ends up working in gay porn because he is so broke, is handled well and is all too believable. What is also so believable is his big break, as the personal assistant/closeted boyfriend to a TV star, and the scandal he gets caught up in. This novel provides fascinating insights into the different levels of showbusiness in Hollywood. How the real stars treat those people below them, but those people’s work keeps them a star. How everyone in LA seems to be part of showbusiness, one way or another. How the only time he is treated with any dignity is when he works in gay porn. Zeffer gives this novel a downbeat but all too real ending, unlike the Hollywood ending of the film based on this novel, leaving the impression that this was a time of madness in the narrator’s life before he returned to the real world when he left LA. This novel is very much based on fact, on Zeffer’s own experiences as a would-be actor in Hollywood; he and the narrator share the same surname, but he does not present us with a novel-as-act-of-revenge, neither is this a cautionary tale. Instead, Zeffer presents this novel as a story that happened without any more judgment. This is a novel for all of us who never believed those rags-to-riches Hollywood stories. Find it here on Amazon

Satire is a difficult form to get right. If it is too humorous then it might not be biting enough; if the satire hits home then it can be dry and even dull, and then it can be humourless and miss its target. These two short stories take a satirical aim at religious persecution and antisemitism in particular. Holocaust Tips for Kids is a young teenage American boy’s view of the Nazi Holocaust. It reads like that teenage boy’s scrapbook, facts and reportage sit all beside the boy’s own writing on how he would survive a modern holocaust. This takes broad swipes at Hollywood action-adventure films, using their logic to fight a holocaust. Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown is written in the form of the classic American Charlie Brown story, using almost all the many characters from that world. Here there is a war, in the Charlie Brown world, between the believers in Schulz, the creature of them all, and the Giant Pumpkin God. The characters quickly fall into the different factions, seeing the others as heathens and therefore justifying their own actions. Shalom Auslander has captured both these separate worlds extremely well. In the first story, he captures both the voice and logic of a teenage boy. In the second story, he unnervingly captures the tone and sound of the Charlie Brown stories. Unfortunately, Auslander’s satire is nothing new and fires at targets that other writers hit bull’s-eyes on long before him. The skill of his writing impressed me, tonally these two stories are so different and yet each of them perfectly captures the voice they are written in. But the satire here is nothing new, we have heard it all before by other writers. I wish Auslander had taken aim at different, new targets here or had found something new to say. Find it here on Amazon

It was spring 1996 and I was on my break at work. The staff room was an old storeroom at the far end of the ward. A collection of old chairs had been arranged in a haphazard circle around an equally old coffee table. It wasn’t highly decorated, or even been decorated in years, and was barely comfortable, but it was a staff room actually located on the ward. Back then that felt like such a luxury. I was on my own there, so often I had to take my breaks alone so we could maintain enough nurses on the ward, but it had become routine for me. I was having a drink and catching up with reading that week’s copy of the Nursing Standard magazine. I was reading an article about sexual relationships between nurses and patients. Not something I had or would ever experience first-hand, but I knew of a few ex-colleagues who had had relationships with ex-patients and that always made me uncomfortable. In a text box, in the article, was a list of activities that could be classed as sexual molestation, if performed without consent. As I read down the list, I had a cold and horrible realization; I had been the victim of this, I had been sexually molested. Before then, I told myself that being sexually molested involved some kind of actual sexual activity, someone forcing you into a sexual act. This list contained activities such as fondling, kissing and groping of the genitals. Nowhere did it say that it had to be a full-blown sexual act. For too long, I had told myself that what happened to me hadn’t been any kind of sexual abuse, it was just one of those things that had happened. It was ten years before, the Summer of 1985; I was aged nineteen and I had gone to a Christian Arts Festival, a Christian version of a very down-market Glastonbury Festival. I had gone there with a group of young people, my age, from the church I was a member of. Unfortunately, the group didn’t run very coherently. Everyone agreed that we should all do the festival together but no one could decide what we should go to see and do together. There were already “discussions” over what events and artists we should see, and no one was interested in the theatre tents. But I was. I was just discovering theatre and the power of it, the joy of writing scripts. I wanted to see everything the two theatre tents there had to offer. By early on the first afternoon, I had given everyone the slip and gone off to see the plays and talks and to attend the workshops that I wanted to see on my own. I threw myself into a long weekend of plays and talks; most of them I saw on my own but that didn’t matter, I was used to being on my own. (Looking back on those plays and talks now, I find many of them naïve and simplistic, not many of them stand out for their attempt to discuss their subjects with any depth.) There was one play performed there that year called Skin Deep and I was determined to see it on my own. It billed itself as a look at twentieth century sexuality but its synopsis told me it was a look at being gay and Christian. I was so deeply in the closet then that I could not dare tell anyone else that I was going to see that play because the admission would have opened me up to far too many questions, so I imagined. So I went on my own. Looking back on it Skip Deep was very simplistic and a bit homophobic. It was about three young friends, a closeted gay man, his female friend and his male friend. The gay man comes out to his female friend and confesses he’s in love with his male friend. The rest of the play was the gay man agonising about being in love with his straight best friend, with different and stylised sections looking at attitudes to sexuality. The play ended with the gay man confessing his love to his male friend, only for the male friend to beat him up for doing so. The gay man then took an overdose and died. After his death, his female friend started a relationship with his male friend. Now I would have been repulsed by the play’s simplistic and rather homophobic plot. Back then I was swept away by seeing my own sexuality, and my fears about it, portrayed on stage. The gay character had killed himself, at the end, and I feared that that would be my fate too. I had been involved with the True Freedom Trust for over a year then and was trying to live by their philosophy, but it was a cold, hard and difficult life. I was also struggling to live up to their philosophy because the church I was attending then, back in Liverpool, offered me no place where I could safely come out to anyone. Now I was watching on stage my greatest fear, that being gay was a lonely and cold life and could cause my death. At the end of the play there was announcement that if anyone was affected by the play then the counselling tent was available. I went straight there. Of course it had affected me. In the tent I was introduced to a counsellor, a man, MC, who was “experienced” in what I needed to talk about. He soon told me that he too worked for True Freedom Trust but was based in the south of England. I told him about how I was feeling after watching the play and how disturbed and afraid I was that I would turn into the central character. MC responded by giving me a hug (now I would find that very questionable, but back then I was too naïve to question it). I was so desperate for the affection that I gave myself over to that hug. But MC didn’t stop there. He kissed me on top of my head and on my forehead. He caressed me and even rubbed his own erection, through his trousers, against my leg. I was too naïve to stop him, to even understand what he was doing, I didn’t even know this was sexual. But it all left me feeling so confused. I was supposed to be turning heterosexual, turning away from being homosexual, and yet I was getting very sexually aroused from MC’s actions. Why was this? MC encouraged me to keep going to see HM, at the Wirral offices of the True Freedom Trust, and of course I agreed with him. Then I didn’t feel able to question him, I didn’t know what else I could do. I left that counselling tent feeling very confused. My body had responded so sexually to MC’s fondling, such a strong and uncontrollable response. Why had that happened? Why wasn’t I changing? It all fed into my feelings of being a failure, that God had abandoned me, that God had actually turned his back on me, and I didn’t know why. Guilt quickly followed on from that confusion, I had done something wrong, somehow I had caused this situation and it was my fault for physically responding to it. I told no one about what had happened to me, I pushed that memory as far down as I could. Again, I felt it was my fault that it had happened, that I had placed myself willingly into the situation where I could be used. Then, that spring day in 1996, I was confronted by what had happened to me and it was sexual abuse, I had been molested, a publication that I deeply respected told me so. It hit me in the face. But I had to go back to work moments later, again there wasn’t the chance to talk about how I felt, even if I had been ready for it, but it played on my mind. A realisation that would not go away. It would take me longer to realise and accept that it wasn’t my fault. I had been a vulnerable teenager and MC took advantage of that; he should never have even hugged me. Now, looking back on what happened to me, and not attempting to justify MC’s actions, his behaviour was a deep indictment of how impossible it was to live up to the requirements of the True Freedom Trust. MC was a deeply frustrated man and the only way he could find any release for it was to grope men who came to him for counselling. This is completely unacceptable behaviour. As a nurse, I have looked after people who have been deeply upset. I have held their hands, placed my hand on their forearm or shoulder, but never anything more. To use someone who comes to you for help in the way MC used me is never acceptable. The True Freedom Trust’s teaching, that the only acceptable life for a gay man is that of cold celibacy, is wrong and dangerous. It condemns people to a cold and loveless life and to sexual frustrations that can cause people to act out in dangerous and even abusive ways. It took me so long to realise that. I don’t know what happened to MC. Years after my encounter with him, I was one of three men who exposed his actions in a television documentary, and this resulted in him being kicked out of the True Freedom Trust, but after that I do not know anything else of him. I hope he found freedom and stopped molesting other men under the guise of counselling them. Drew Find the next story in this series here

Gay marriage has been making the headlines recently and there are a lot of arguments for and against it. At the heart of a lot of these arguments is whether homosexuality is “natural” or “unnatural”. Simon LeVay is a neuroscientist and takes an evidence-based approach to his subject. He doesn’t just look at the theories behind human sexuality; he looks at the evidence for those theories, or lack of it. This is what lifts this book head and shoulders above previous books looking at the origins of human sexuality. LeVay doesn’t have one theory that he is pushing; instead he takes a critical look at all of them. He concludes that our sexualities are a product of our genes, sex hormones and brain systems (nature not nurture), but it is how he reaches this conclusion that is fascinating. He analyses the data with a refreshing evidence-based approach. This book is also written in clear and easy to read prose, not in an academic style, full of jargon and language that is difficult to understand. LeVay uses clear English; his explanations draw the reader in, not putting you off. The subject matter might not be of interest to everyone, but this book can benefit all nurses. We’re called to give unbiased care to all; this book helps us see sexuality as a natural part of life. (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine and published there in April 2013) Find it here on Amazon

Wow, that's wonderful. It's such a great way to find a new author, you can hear their voice (via the audio sample) and see if you like it before buying it. I have started so many books, in the past, and stopped reading them because the author's style is so bad. I read this one on eBook, but its how I read most books now. I like Patrick Gale because he is so good at getting under the skin of his characters and telling his story via them, but that's a style I really enjoy.

So glad to hear this. I am a long-term fan of Patrick Gale, I discovered his writing back in 1990s thanks to another book review. I was so impressed with this book, especially that it is a historical novel and yet Gale doesn't let modern attitudes bleed into his narrative, but it isn't an easy read.

Charles is the apple of his mother’s eye, born in Cornwall just after the end of the First World War. He becomes the focus of his mother’s life after his father dies from TB. But Charles does not want to be a “mother’s boy” and when war breaks out, he leaves his claustrophobic life in Teignmouth, enlisting in the navy as a coder. The title of this novel has a double meaning and Patrick Gale uses both of them with skill and breadth. Charles is a boy raised as his mother’s sole outlet, the sole reason for her life, though Charles, as an adolescent, becomes aware that he is attracted to other boys, but he knows some of those boys could betray him and so much of his attraction is illegal. This novel is set in the time between the First and Second World Wars and Gale captures the repression and social order of that time. Charles, an intelligent boy, can only stay in education until his time at grammar school ends because his mother cannot afford for him to stay any longer. Charles is also aware that his attractions are illegal, he displays a distaste for a friend who embraces his attractions, though that distaste is more driven by fear. Joining the navy is an eye-opening experience, both professionally and emotionally. So many of his experiences affect him deeply, but he also meets other serving men who are far more comfortable with their desires and their openness pulls him along with them. Gale captures the repression of the inter-war years but he also shows how the Second World War, with its mixing of people from all different backgrounds, brushed away so much of that repression and so many people’s lives benefited from that. His descriptions of wartime life are some of the most memorable parts of this novel. This is Gale at the highest of his skills. He sympathetically and insightfully writes about his characters here, drawing characters that are all too recognisable, but he does not forget that he is writing about a very different time than today. It was so refreshing to read a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s where modern-day attitudes do not bleed into the narrative and characters. This reaches right through to the novel’s ending. Here is a novel well worth the time it took to read, not a moment wasted. Find it here on Amazon

My big writing news this month is that my short story “Men Online in the Local Area” has been published in Showtime 2022. It is about Harry, a young man living in East London, who is finding building a new life in his new home difficult. Superficially, it is about the ups and downs of using dating apps, but its real subject is about how a big, busy city can be a very lonely and difficult place to form new friendships in. This anthology, Showtime 2022, is special to me because I am one of the editors of it. I am a member of Newham Writers Workshop and my writing has really benefitted from it. Having honest feedback has shown me what works, in my writing, and what needs improvement. It has also helped me learn so much about writing techniques and what makes good writing. My short story, “Men Online in the Local Area”, really benefitted from this feedback. Members showed me what worked, what could enhance it, and what distracted from it. They helped me rewrite the opening of it and to work towards the ending. I won’t post the original version here because I am much happier with the finished version in Showtime 2022, it is the far better story. Each year we, Newham Writers Workshop, produce an anthology of members’ work, called Showtime. For the past two editions (the pandemic prevented us publishing one in 2021) I’ve been one of the editors of it. My main role has been sorting out its formatting, not always easy, and getting it published on Amazon. Showtime 2022 is a grab-bag of different types of writing. There is poetry, short stories, essays, a book synopsis and even the results of a writing exercise. They also cover a wide variety of subjects, just as varied as the different people who make up the membership of Newham Writers Workshop. Whether read on the go or sitting back in a comfortable chair, this book is a treasure chest of different and inspiring writing, a chance to find a writer you have not heard of. Happy reading Drew P.S. Find past editions of Showtime here

@Gary L, thank you for the amazing feedback. Of course you can use my review, as long as you cite it when you do. I have a great former magazine editor, now retired, Roger Evens, to thank for teaching me how to write reviews. His main advice was to tell the reader if I thought the book was worth reading or not, and to give the evidence for my opinion. I owe Roger so much of all the great advice he gave me.

It is 2008 and John, an Irish university student, is spending a year at an American liberal arts college. During that year he forms three very different relationships with three very different young men—the radically gay Jake, Eric the straight jock whose life is turned upside down when he is shot, and Brendon, his former best friend from Ireland. Also during that year he will be involved in a shooting, cause a scandal at a historical monument, meet an ex-president and be complimented by a rising Hollywood star. Unfortunately, this novel does not live up to its plot summary. Rather than an emotional roller-coaster ride of discovery and entry into the adult life, it felt plodding and lacking understanding of its characters. None of the characters felt like real people, they just seemed to be there to serve the plot. The plot also felt very pedestrian, moving from one event on to another; each event seemed to finished and rounded off before the next one began. No event bleeds into the next one. So many times in this novel we’re told what has happened, rather than shown what happened, without any insight into the characters and their actions. Far too many times the narrator turns into the author philosophising about different aspects of gay life and life in general. These sections, apart from adding nothing to the plot or narrative, did not read like the musings of a 19/20-year-old Irish young man; they read like the philosophising of a middle-aged, cultured man. But worst of all was the fact that the narrator’s voice was all wrong. He was supposed to be a 19/20-year-old Irish young man, in America for the first time, exploring what it means to be a gay man. There was no wonder, no culture shock, no comparing American culture to the one he’d grown up in, no questioning of the new culture he was living in; he didn’t even get confused with the new currency he had to use. He spoke and behaved like an American man. There were so many missed opportunities in this novel, in so many ways it could have been so such better, but so many times it fell back on cliché or lacklustre plot turns. After finishing reading this novel, I was left wondering what the point to it was; it was so flat and lacking in insights. Find it here on Amazon

Thanks for this wonderful feedback. I wrote this blog to put together all I knew about my parents before they married, which wasn't much. My father loved to tell stories of his adventures during the second world war, but they were much more "boys own adventures", I do wonder if he made-up a large number of them. I wish he and my mother had just told me stories about themselves and lives, especially their lives before I was born, but they kept so much "private". I was able to piece some things together, as an adult, with a bit of detective work.